The shortest story (no love, no glory)
by Swamy
Summary: Post 2x22 of The Flesh. Black Siren is imprisoned, and for her it's nothing new.
**Note:** This is a two parts story, post episode 2x22 of _The Flash_. I hope I will be able to write and post the second part soon. Thanks to onebatchtwobatchpennyanddime over tumblr for working as beta for this chapter. #NoLaurelNoArrow, #LaurelLanceDeservedBetter.

#

They don't trust the bad girl; no one ever does. It's familiar, almost comfortable in a way very few would even just begin to understand. She watches them with contempt through the double pane soundproof glass, plays with the food they leave her, with the fear she can still arouse with a single look, lets her mouth curve in just the slightest grin like she knows something they don't. They won't keep them locked up forever.

They couldn't when she was just a scared little thing that weighted just enough to not be carried away by the wind; they won't do it now.

#

At some point they must realize they need to keep her sane if she's going to be of any use because Cisco stops by her cell sometimes, asking her stupid questions, like if she is alright, though he can't possibly hear the answer that she doesn't bother to give anyway.

She is used to being confined, restricted in worse ways than this. In the silence she can hear the rhythmic, maddening sound of a drop of water hitting the dirty porcelain of a sink coming from the memories she buried – turns out – not so well, so she is almost glad of the distraction when Cisco's short visits become longer. They try to drag out memories she needs to stay dead.

He hasn't much to tell her, actually. All the questions she can see piling up on his mind are about _her_. So he puts a chair in front of her cell and reads to her, usually the newspaper, so that she knows where is, what time it is. Back then, in the orphanage where they _helped_ her become what she is now it was a luxury she didn't have. She had learned counting the minutes and the hours and the days through the recovery breaks she was allowed to take, through the tests she was forced to endure, through the changes of the guards that looked through her like she didn't occupy any space in the building or in their minds, like she didn't exist at all.

So she learns about the Wall Street fluctuations, the sex scandals, the new superheroes popping up in Gotham City, and she usually listens because you never know what can turn out to be useful. She always listens, but one day, that day he's reading her of The Flash's latest heroic act but there's a pair of sad eyes staring at her from the back page, eyes she can recognize on a face she never got to see. His name is familiar and yet not.

She wants to ask him to skip the triviality and read what she wants to hear but Cisco can't hear her, the sounds only go in, never out. She stands close to the window, uses the tip of her finger to make the nail produce the tiniest sound, like a bird hitting the glass with their beak – it is strange to be able to obtain what she wants through no struggle.

Cisco raises his lively eyes on her, eyebrows up in curiosity as she uses her index to motion him to turn the paper. His eyes land on the same face she saw and he seems reluctant to do as she asks.

"You want me to read this?" he asks, raising his eyes on her while keeping his face down. He looks like he's about to read an epitaph when in fact all the article is about is something boring and definitely longer than it should be about Queen Consolidates, now divested of its weapon contracts. TThe article mentions Oliver, who inherited the company after the death of his parents, describes him so vaguely that she can't imagine what kind of man he can be. She never tried to imagine what kind of man Oliver Queen would have been, had he survived the shipwreck with his father. She never wondered, during her years in the asylum they transferred to after the particle accelerator explosion, if Oliver would find her one day.

Robert Queen was not enthusiastic about his son's obsession. Oliver thought she had gotten away, free of them, escaped in the night with another bunch of kids and "He's still looking for you." He told her once, with an barely concealed contempt, like she was his son's weak excuse to procrastinate homework.

Oliver never found her, and maybe by the time he died, she didn't even exist anymore. Not the girl he lay with, on the cold floor. Not Lauren, whom he staggered for.

He was barely a man and weak, and Lauren learned that that's no excuse, that you can never be weak.

#

Cisco knows what she wants to know and he's not happy about it. He sighs, raising his head to look at her. She's sitting with her legs crossed on the cot that comes out off the wall and she doesn't say a thing.

"Do you know him?" he asks, "I mean, on Earth-2. I suppose there are mirror relationships, just like mirror people, so were you two… enemies?" he asks. There is a spark of curiosity, maybe something akin to confusion in her eyes, which doesn't quite fit. He knows she's trying to guess the kind of relationship Oliver and Laurel had, and he really wants to know why it matters to her. Even if she decides to share – which he's sure she won't – he can't take the risk of hearing it.

#

She's somewhere else; in her mind she is somewhere else. It's a trick she had to learn to keep her strength intact, her will unbroken by their experiments, by the isolation. Hunter's venom and her pain, hard as concrete made her forget the tenderness of her body constantly covered in blue bruises.

In the beginning she went to the island, where Oliver was still alive, young as she remembered him, and waiting for her; they could play through the waterfalls and the majestic trees, eat sweet fruits until their bellies hurt and fell asleep against each other, her head always nested on his shoulder, but it made her sad and emotions are too draining, so she stopped.

These were fantasies for a little girl that never learned a thing from the hell she knew. And she learned a thing or two. Now when she goes away she's alone, commanding the elements with her voice, breaking mountains just because, and each one of her steps wither the flowers on her path.

The metal shutter lifts with a strident sound and she opens her eyes, curious. Cisco is early.

Her lips form a grin as she rises to sit on the cot and let her long legs dangle from it, "Missed me?" she spells as she stares at the other side of the glass.

Oliver Queen looks like he's seen the dead. That, to him, is exactly what it is.

For a moment it gets to her, his sole presence, the way he rushes towards the glass and presses his hands against the double pane glass, the way his voice breaks a little when he says _her_ name.

She truly doesn't know this man; she hardly knew the boy he was on Earth-2. All she can say is that he used to sneak into the floor where she was kept with the other _special kids_ and lay on the floor, mirroring her position.

The _special kids_ he envied because they got all of his father's attentions, he discovered, were pitiful things kept like lab rats. All that was missing was the hamster wheel.

She had a camp bed but sometimes the injections made her organs burn so much she had to lie on the floor to find some relief.

The first time she saw him he was all neatly dressed and well groomed. She remembers his eyes blinking and going wide in front of the skinny girl wearing a hospital gown, wrists adorned with the tubes of the I.V.

She remembers her own embarrassment, the strong need to vanish into thin air in front of that proper boy, though she had stopped wishing for that even during her daily tests. He was confused and curious and he _blushed_. She forgot her own fear because of that and for years she never knew what that meant, or why he stumbled upon his own words when he said, "I-I'm Oliver… Who are you?".

He was thirteen and she was barely ten, and she made him stagger.

Now she can watch as the realization pierces his mind, can see the way the illusion shatters and crumbles upon his gorgeous face. She can see the exact instant the notion sinks into his very soul. His blonde lashes tremble, his eyes empty out for the shortest moment and the breath breaks in the middle of his chest, like she just killed _her_ a second time around.

It's a show she can watch with a sort of detached pity. Maybe prey on his pain as a way to pass the time.

He takes a step back, with a precarious balance, looks at her trying to find a detail that doesn't match, something that will tell him that she is a fake, a cheap copy of what for him it's the original, and she observes him, every change in a façade otherwise stagnant. He can't find any.

"Who are you?" he breathes.


End file.
